Customer portal – as an administrator

Instead of spending valuable time on back and forth communication, exchanging countless emails, and organizing frequent catch-ups with clients, you can create a Customer portal for your site and invite your clients to join the portal. This allows you to conveniently give them access to important information and work together on projects effortlessly. It's a great way of strengthening customer relationships by providing a transparent and open ground for successful collaboration.

This article will show you how to set up a Customer portal for your site, what the Customer portal users can see and do on your site, how to manage the portal settings, invite and manage the portal users, and add them to projects.

1. What can Customer portal users do and see on your site?

Customer portal users have access to real-time information about their company and projects depending on permissions you've granted them. All other internal information you haven't given them access to is kept strictly confidential.

To ensure that Customer portal users will access only the details they need to see, we recommend setting up the permission sets for the portal users based on your use cases before inviting users to your portal.

2. Setting up a Customer portal

To set up a Customer portal for your site:

1. First, go to Settings > Administration > Plan, add-ons and billing and purchase the Customer portal add-on. Learn more about buying and managing add-ons. 
   
2. Enable the customer portal and add the necessary permissions for the relevant permissions sets:
   1. Go to Settings > Administration > Permission sets.
   2. Click on Modules and actions for the relevant permission set.
   3. Tick the rights you want to grant for the permission set.
   4. Click Save.
      

Once you've enabled the Customer portal and the relevant rights for the permission sets, you can go to Settings > Site settings > Customer portal to manage the portal settings, invite and manage users, and add them to projects.

3. Managing your Customer portal settings

Once you've enabled the Customer portal for your site, you can set up the Customer portal user permission sets, select the default PDF templates for documents for the portal users, invite and manage the portal users, and add them to projects.

We recommend starting by setting up the Customer portal user permission sets and selecting the default PDF templates and adding the portal users afterwards. Let's go through everything step by step!

3.1. Managing Customer portal user permission sets

To control what your Customer portal users can see and do on your site, you can manage permission sets for various use cases under Settings > Site settings > Customer portal > Permission sets.

These are just some of the typical use cases, but there can be others depending on the nature of your projects and client relationships:

• Customers with whom you want to be fully transparent
  • These clients should be able to track at any time how far you are with the project, which tasks have been completed, what still needs to be finished, and see an overview of the timeline for the deliverables.
  • They also need access to financial documents issued for their company to keep an eye on the project budget.   
• Customers with whom you and your team will collaborate
  • These clients are ones with whom you need efficient collaboration.
  • For example, your designers may want to share design mock-ups with the customer and receive feedback directly in Scoro. This way, all information is accessible in one single place, and all interested parties are in the loop. 
• Long-term customers with multiple projects
  • They are your long-term client with multiple projects running at the same time. Different Project Managers are involved in the projects, both from your side and theirs.
  • At times, these clients are late with the payments because invoices do not reach their finance department on time (you send the invoice to the relevant PMs, who are responsible for approving and forwarding the invoice to their Finance team). Giving their Finance team access to all invoices (and quotes and contracts) right there on your Scoro site will eliminate this issue, as the finance team can see the outstanding invoices and has access to the necessary information sooner. 

There are two default permission sets with the following rights:

• Customer portal full access – users with this permission set will see invoices, quotes, orders, projects, tasks, events (including their descriptions), files, comments, and notifications.
• Customer portal limited access – users with this permission set will see projects, files, comments, and notifications.

Once it's clear what use cases apply to your case, you can edit the default permission sets as needed and create new ones:

1. To create a new permission set, click the Add permission set button. Alternatively, click on the permission set name to modify an existing permission set.
2. Enter or edit the permission set name.
3. Tick the relevant permissions. For example, a designer might not need access to financial documents; however, a project manager might need to get a full overview of the project, needing all possible access rights.
4. Click Save.

Once you've set up the permission sets as needed, you can start inviting users to your portal. 

3.2. Adding a default PDF template for Customer portal users

To ensure that yor Customer portal users are able to open documents (quotes, invoices, orders) related to their company, add a default PDF template under Settings > Site settings > PDF templates.

1. First, add a new PDF template for each document or select one from your existing templates. Make sure to switch the For internal use only toggle for the templates you want to use in the Customer Portal. Learn more about creating and modifying PDF templates.
2. Then, go to Settings > Site settings > Customer portal > Settings and select the default PDF templates for the various document types, such as quotes, invoices, and others.
3. Click Save.

4. Managing Customer portal users

Under Settings > Site settings > Customer Portal > Users, you can:

• invite new portal users
• deactivate portal users
• reactivate the deactivated users

4.1. Inviting portal users

You can invite contacts to your portal in two ways:

• From the Users tab in the Customer portal settings
• From the contact card

To invite users from the Users tab in the portal settings:

1. Click the Add user button.
   
2. Click the Link with contact person dropdown field and choose the person you want to invite to your portal.
3. Click Save and send invitation.
   

To invite users from the contact card:

1. Go to Contacts or People module.
2. Click on the name of the contact you want to grant the Customer portal access to.
3. Click the Give access button.
   
4. Most of the data is filled out based on the person's information in Scoro. Make any changes if needed and select a permission set for the user.
5. Click Save and send invitation. You can also click Save if you want to send them the invitation later on.

Once you've sent the invitation, the person will automatically receive an email with a link to join your Scoro site. 

The Users tab will show all your users and their statuses:

• Active – users who have accepted the invitation to join Scoro and can access your site
• Awaiting – saved users you haven't sent the invitation yet
• Pending – users who have received the invitation to join but haven't accepted it yet
• Inactive – deactivated user accounts that cannot access your site. Learn more about deactivating and reactivating Customer portal users.

In the People list, contacts with Customer portal access will also have a green icon.

In the contact detailed view, there's a Customer portal button next to the name of the person:

• If the button is green, it means that they've accepted their invitation and their Customer portal user account is active.
• If the button is orange, they haven't accepted their invitation to join your site yet and their account is not active.

You can click on the button to open their Customer portal user profile.

4.2. Deactivating portal users

To deactivate a Customer portal user:

1. Click on the portal user's name
2. Switch the Active toggle off and confirm your choice.

Once deactivated, the user will no longer be able to access your Scoro site.

4.3. Reactivating portal users

To reactivate a Customer portal user:

1. In the Inactive users section, click on the name of the user you want to reactivate
2. Switch the Active toggle on and confirm your choice.

5. Adding Customer portal users to projects

When users have accepted their invitations and joined your site, you can easily add them to projects in the project detailed view:

1. Click on the Project members in the project header.
2. Customer portal users linked to the related company will automatically be listed in the members list under the Customer portal users section. Select the portal user(s) you want to give access to the project.
3. Click Apply.

Once added, you'll see the Customer portal users as members in the project header, with a green circle around their avatar to easily distinguish these external users from your team members.

In the project list, projects with customer portal users have a green Customer portal icon.